February 3, 2012 Take a minute to imagine that your childhood went a little like this… You start out your life with your parents speaking only English to you, and to anyone for that matter. Because that’s the only language they know. They never really went to school. You get a decent start on English, [...]
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December 14, 2011 Tonight was the first time I noticed my little host brother Anwar actually saying my name right. He still said it in his cute little boy voice, but he can officially pronounce “Hind” now. No more “Lahan!” and no more “Hin!” Now just plain old “Hind!” He made up for this development [...]
Pictures of the tooth/mouth model my friends Amber and Sean made and gave to me. Materials are half-liter milk boxes, drink bottles, cardboard, string, duct tape, white paint, and butcher paper (folded and colored pink with marker or paint).
September 8, 2011 Say to yourself: Peace Corps is NOT “two years out of my life.” Peace Corps IS “my life for two years.” PCVs who stay focused on the idea that their Peace Corps service is just a step between one thing and another, like college and a “real” job, tend to find themselves [...]
September 2, 2011 I’ve learned time and again here, as I seem to forget after each time that I learn it, that what seems like I’ll never ever Ever in a million years be able to do, the first time I try it, I can usually end up doing pretty well if I give it [...]
August 24, 2011 Old Ijjou stopped me on my way to my host family’s house today. She told me to sit with her since we hadn’t chatted in a long time, so I found a spot next to her on her doorstep and listened for a while. It’s always enjoyable to listen to her colorful [...]
August 24, 2011 Quite frequently when I was at school in Chapel Hill I would hear the raging rants of “the Pit Preacher” and other evangelical Christians who set up in the center of campus. Their aim seemed to be to shame people into “renouncing their sinful ways” and taking up a sincere belief in [...]
August 23, 2011 This morning I was headed out of town, walking out my door just at the right time to catch the bus if it wasn’t running early. I didn’t have any plans that were too pressing, but transportation has been so off lately that a missed chance can mean sitting at the road [...]
August 19, 2011 Today I found myself chatting with my three main nurses at the central clinic in my market town. My counterpart nurse, who mans the tiny dispensary in my village and with whom I spend the most time, gave me a ride into town after we made the usual Friday visit to the [...]
August 7, 2011 The country of Morocco has roughly the same population size and land area as California, minus a couple million people and plus several thousand square kilometers. (Of course, those numbers depend on whether or not one considers the bit of the Sahara Desert towards the south as the “Moroccan Sahara” or the [...]
August 6, 2011 I had a fun conversation with my host mom this afternoon while we were sitting waiting for her bread to cook in the oven. After a lull in the chatting, she suddenly announced, “Tshibt! You’re grey!” She had had this revelation one time before, during the Big Holiday last November, but I [...]
July 27, 2011 This afternoon I’m cooking lentils to go with some rice and vegetable curry. I’m afraid the lentils might not work out, but at least the curry is great on the rice! My problem is that I looked a little too closely at the lentils as they were boiling. I noticed one lentil [...]
July 18, 2011 While we tend to think of society in a conservative place like Morocco as restricting some of the things that people want to do, it’s surprisingly more acceptable to do some things here that you probably wouldn’t do even if you wanted to back in America. You’d stop yourself either to maintain [...]
July 10, 2011 Yesterday I finally got to go visit my host family for the first time since coming back. Everyone but my host father had been out of town during the week. I’d been planning on heading over anyway, but my host mom beeped my phone around 3:00 and I took that as my [...]
July 6, 2011 … when your local shop stops carrying garlic. Today I went to the shop in my market town specifically to buy garlic. Thankfully that wasn’t the only reason I waited for over an hour to catch a ride in to town. When I asked if they had garlic, the shopkeeper gave me [...]
July 6, 2011 I’ve decided that it’s nice to be back in a place where the motions of life take more time than back in America. Half of my reasoning for that decision is that there are aspects of this sort of slower life that I really like and appreciate. The other half is the [...]
July 5, 2011 My old man neighbor knocked on my door this afternoon. When I opened it he said, “Wazdwit?” (cass-crute or afternoon snack) and held out a brown plastic bag that was full of prickly pears. What a nice welcome home!
July 3, 2010 This post is meant more for myself and my memory than for others. That said, I’m just writing whatever comes to mind. It’s fascinating what a great big release of stress does to a person, at least, a person like me. Sometimes it isn’t all that apparent that the stress is there to [...]
February 15, 2011 This afternoon I had a nice visit at my host family’s house after what felt like a long time of being away. Life’s been busy lately. I’m really glad to be back home for a good six-week stretch before I’m off again to other adventures. There were two highlights from today’s tea [...]
January 18, 2011 As I was walking back into town this afternoon after a busy morning of traveling around with the “equipe mobile” (mobile team of nurses), I got a surprise phone call from my boss… After he asked if I was running because I was panting, and I told him no, I was just [...]
December 14, 2010 My host mom seemed to take quite a bit of delight in preparing some goat brains as the afternoon snack of the day. She laughed and commented on how I’m probably not used to eating brains, and would I even barf? No, I told her, I could keep it down. I did, however, [...]
December 9, 2010 This morning as I was walking up my road on my way out of town I had an enjoyable sensation. It was like I was feeling fall on my feet! A cool fall breeze was floating along the ground and since I was wearing sandals without socks, my toes got a happy [...]
December 1, 2010 I reached into my desk tonight and encountered some spider webs that usually aren’t there… so I thought I’d take a look. Here’s what I found:
November 30, 2010 This afternoon I hestitated on coming straight home from a health lesson at the middle school, semi-successful (looking on the bright side here, it really was mostly useless, but that’s ok, and it was only my second lesson in my site, actually, after more than a year and a half living here) because [...]
November 13, 2010 Jess noticed an extremely random and unexpected sight today as we were walking across a main road in Tiznit: an SUV with a license plate from… Mississippi. Mississippi? Of all the states in America, and with most of the Moroccans I’ve heard of living in the States apparently in California, New Jersey, and New [...]
November 11, 2010 And it was worth the wait. My host mom, Naima, told me once a long time ago that she really likes tajine of will (hard to say quite right, pronounced like “wheel” with a strong stress on the l). I resolved to find will and bring it to her so she could [...]
November 4, 2010 Today has been a good day. Most of the days of the past month have actually been wonderful, with work starting back up again and the weather turning beautiful. Today I did a morning’s worth of work (which I know I never talk about–perhaps someday I’ll finally get around to talking about [...]
October 22, 2010 This morning as I was reading my latest issue of The Economist, I saw a picture that made me pause and reflect for a moment. It’s a picture of a woman (here, from Zimbabwe), preparing a large pot of sweet potatoes. Nothing special. What caught my eye, though, was that her sweet potatoes [...]
October 14, 2010 This afternoon I was chatting with my host father, watching him sew up a run-down pair of shoes. His first comment after we passed the usual greetings was, “In America you all would just throw these away, but here, having spent 100 dirhams [12-and-a-half dollars] on these shoes, we sew them up! We [...]
September 18, 2010 In just one short week I’ve found myself in a wonderful place, having achieved the summit of two rather substantial mountains, one figurative and one literal. Let me tell you – it’s a WONDERFUL feeling! The first mountain, rather small and of the figurative sort, was the 29 days of fasting during Ramadan [...]
August 29, 2010 Today I was hurtin’ a bit because I didn’t sleep much last night on account of sweating too much. It’s HOT. I’m tired of my house being just above 90°F. On top of the temperature, my normally reliable ocean breeze has abandoned me. Not good for Ramadan! Anyway, I took a nap [...]
August 26, 2010 I’ve made it just past the half-way mark of my second Ramadan here in Morocco now. So far the month of fasting (no food or drinks from before sun-up until sun-down) has been going pretty well. Most of the first two weeks was a breeze because the weather was nice and cool. This [...]
August 13, 2010 It’s 3:22am right now. Kinda early! I’m up in order to eat some good food and drink LOTS of water in preparation for Day of Fasting #2, Ramadan 1431/2010. Yesterday went really well, I didn’t get too hungry and when I was even a little hungry, it didn’t last very long. I’ll [...]
August 6, 2010 This morning when I went down to get some water, I noticed that the rope off my cistern bucket had disappeared… A strange problem to have. There was my nice blue bucket, sitting next to the hatch, ropeless. Thankfully my landlord’s family is in town right now and had their own bucket [...]
June 30, 2010 This morning I was waiting at the bus stop along with an older lady from Izran. We were talking for a while before I noticed something interesting about what she was wearing… She had on the traditional amalhof single-sheet full-body wrap as most older women do when they travel to the city. Nothing [...]
May 22, 2010 Just had a thought–I’m the only PCV in the province of Tiznit right now. Out of 13 of us, everyone else is gone off to all different places across Morocco. I walked in my door about 20 minutes ago after a day-trip up to Agadir, and here I am the only one [...]
April 11, 2010
… I just discovered yet another reason to wish for running water.
The day has been off to a good start. It’s not yet 8:00am, but I’ve gone walking with some ladies in the neighborhood, made some bread dough from scratch, and while I was waiting for the dough to rise I thought I’d [...]
April 7, 2010
This morning I did something I had fervently hoped I would never do: I dropped my bucket AND my rope into my cistern. Only two weeks ago that wouldn’t have been such a horrible occurence as the water level was within arm’s reach. Now, however, the water has moved down enough that a [...]
March 18, 2010
I’m proud of myself (and at the same time disgusted), today I finally used my jump rope for the first time since my dad mailed it to me last summer.
Besides not sleeping well (almost undoubtedly not helped by the fact that I haven’t been getting much of any sort of exercise), I’ve accumulated [...]
March 16, 2010
Today is the birthday of two of my favorite people in my village, my only real friend among the young girls, and my host mother. This morning I cooked up a batch of Ghirardelli dark chocolate brownies to share with them this afternoon. I was glad to have a reason to make them and [...]
March 13, 2010
Right now I’m reading through David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, and I couldn’t help notice this blurb from the essay that gives the book its title. Sometimes I feel like I’m almost at the point of understanding most of what I hear. The days when I feel like I don’t understand much [...]
March 13, 2010
I couldn’t let this one slip away:
In the middle of our conversation with my friend’s two Moroccan acquaintances, I commented in English that Lady Gaga was on the television. One of the men asked what I’d said, and as soon as I told him it was an American singer named Lady Gaga he [...]
March 13, 2010
This afternoon I found myself sitting down with two Moroccan men I didn’t know in a cafe. I was accompanying a friend who did know them and who is hoping to accomplish some work with them in her site in the future. Nice guys, members of a local development association. I wasn’t sure [...]
March 10, 2010
Period. Fact. As stated by an old Tashlheit woman. Really what she said was something along the lines of, “igh ur t-shit s-ufus, uratshtat.” Thankfully she didn’t take a militant approach to the issue, only switching over herself from the spoon she had starting using against her will. She promptly began eating the tagula, [...]
March 8, 2010
Green fields and yellow flowers in place of red-brown earth, but the ocean’s still there.
March 4, 2010
My away message on Google Chat:
r.i.p. marj’s english
Friend’s renunciation:
it will not rest in peace
your english will return as a zombie
doomed to forever shamble in search of conjugations
Oh, no…
February 26, 2010
The views outside have been absolutely spectacular all day long. There were a few more times around town that I wanted to snap off some photos, but I’d left my camera inside. Big mistake. The caption for the picture I wanted the most but couldn’t take:
The almost-full moon hanging up above the hills [...]
February 26, 2010
Today I started to walk out of town on my way to Just Over the Hill for my usual Friday visit to the clinic there. I’d been debating about going because I was running a bit late and sometimes my nurse doesn’t show up–especially with a holiday tomorrow he might not make it. [...]
February 17, 2010
Hak-ak, a colloquial Tashlheit expression said when one participant in a conversation finally realizes (or does) something that perhaps should have been clear (or done) earlier. Sometimes the one who fails to understand is the one to say hak-ak, and sometimes the expression comes from the one who wishes to point out that the lightbulb [...]
January 10, 2010
With the help of my good colleague Megan I have taken a new step in sharing my Peace Corps experience with others: the posting of videos to YouTube. Never thought I’d do anything with YouTube before, but it seems like it could be a fun addition to my website.
So, without further ado, I’d like [...]
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